thinking + motherhood = feminist

10 rules for women blogging about their relationship woes

Before beginning your rant, and it will be a rant because you’re a woman writing this, always start that post with an apologetic, introductory paragraph about how truly nice your partner is and how he (and he will be a ‘he’) ‘helps’ you around the house and ‘helps’ you with the kids, a lot; really, quite a lot. So, he’s really very good, he’s not one of the bad ones and you love each other very much. Also, he is very tired. He works very hard. To rant without this introduction is disloyal and unloving.

Never admit to the emotion experienced by you as being ‘anger’. It will sound a lot like anger, look a lot like anger, feel a lot like anger but it isn’t anger.. it’s something else, something pre-Betty Friedan, something safer. Frustration, perhaps? Irritation? Yes, irritation. Mild irritation bordering on rage.

Emphasize how the whole problem is just about ‘choice’ and the choices we make. This can be resolved easily. You can choose ‘good’ or ‘bad’ men and you can choose whether you are a doormat or not to them. You have chosen a ‘good’ man, see point 1 above, and you are choosing not to be a doormat. Simple.

When you’re talking about the division of tasks in your relationship be sure to take full account of the paid work (it’s tiring and stressful work – and also high status and financially recompensed) but be much less specific when accounting for all the unpaid work happening in your family, particularly that which is invisible, like emotional work or organisational work, and particularly where if the work is done well it appears effortless to everyone else , like soothing crying children in the middle of the night, straightening the lounge room before guests arrive and remembering what needs re-stocking when you’re at the supermarket.

Talk about how you and he discussed the roles and responsibilities of family life in a reasonable fashion together and you found that it was just ‘easier’ if you were the one who specialised in all that unpaid, invisible work. Pay no attention to the many institutional factors around you that make any other ‘choice’ but this one extremely difficult to ‘choose’. You are making a free choice as a strong, empowered woman with a loving man.

Assume that you have equal negotiating power at home if you are empowered outside the home. It naturally follows that if women have the right to vote, go to school and be CEOs then they are also being treated equally in the home, particularly when they are partnered to a ‘good’ man. This goes double for you if you’re one of those women who has a high level of education and a current (or former) high-paid job.

When you’re ‘buying’ your way out of some of the more difficult inequality problems to resolve, by outsourcing childcare and/or cleaning and/or home maintenance and/or personal life organisation, be sure to mention how ‘sensible’ this option is without any regard for the financial advantages you have that others may not. Again, it is all just about choice. Talk about the importance of ‘couple time’ and how you are very sensibly prioritising this with your partner – never mention the advantages you have that make it possible for you and your partner to go out on ‘date nights’ together. Like, having family living nearby or being able to afford a baby-sitter or how you and your partner don’t work shift-work, and your child doesn’t have the kind of disability that makes it almost impossible to leave them with a ‘sitter.

Your relationship is basically fair and equal, you know this to be true because you keep an eye on such things – on who is doing what and how much and whether it is fair. The fact that you are the one keeping that eye on fairness, and that you’re writing about it and thinking about it and expending energy on that stuff, and not him? Don’t discuss that.

And if your relationship isn’t quite fair and equal then you’re probably failing at feminism, failing at taking charge of your life, failing at discussing things with your partner reasonably, failing at standing up for yourself, and failing at growing up.

Finally, don’t write about your relationship woes. Because women’s lives are part of home-life, and home-life is the private sphere and that should never be discussed in the public sphere.

42 Responses

A female friend of mine told me that one of the most important rules is :- ‘Once any man learns and comprehends the rules then change them all’. It helped me realize that I wasn’t going mad, I lived in a world of ‘mad’. This is a life story not an opinion or “I reckon” however, ready for onslaught now.

Onslaught will begin once I understand what you’re talking about… is this a ‘women are unpredictable’, ‘women are irrational’, ‘women are moody’ kinda thing you’re saying here? Because if so, you can see that that’s a pretty sexist idea, no? You can see that it might warrant an onslaught?

If not, then I’m interested in how your thoughts fit into the topic of my post – which is about the rules imposed upon women by everyone (women and men) about how they represent their personal relationships and the conflict they experience in them to the outside world.

Dear Blue,
Since you wrote this response to my message to you’re blog, I have read heaps of thoughts of other people (yourself included) and I found it interesting that the train of thought and trail of words turned almost instantly away from anything I wrote (potentially and unintentionally insulting or harmful) and onto a subject that I cannot follow anymore. This is not a plea for attention, just pointing out how fast thoughts, words and feelings change so fast but with a flow or path with just a few words to and from you. That’s why I voted for you, you seem to manage it frequently. I won’t be involved for a while, so thank you and please continue using words.

I want to leave a thoughtful response, but seem to only be able to think in gifs. A slow, impressed clap for this post for pointing out these ridiculous social standards, and a “look at all the fucks I do not give” one for the standards themselves.

My comment is a standing joke between myself and a couple of female friends I have, it is a response to any male who claims to have women “all sorted out” and knows all their “rules etc”. The idea of changing the rules every time a male claims this was theirs and was to show that no matter how much we think we know, look out, there’ more. Nothing was meant to be demeaning, accusing or offensive. If it has caused offense, then apologies.
As to how the comment (as it is not mine just borrowed) relates to your topic is that no matter who or why a rule is made, there is a rule that states you can always change the rules.
I hope this shows the good humor that was intended and the true apology that is offered for offense. I enjoy your blog because it’s fun, intelligent and in it you occasionally bare your teeth. I’ve still been pondering the question you put forward about what to tell your byrne about “The Police”, that’s a brain turner.
That’s all I have, laying the boots or not, I typed it, I’ll wear it. Z.

Yes, and not just blogging, but also talking about relationship woes. For me,the inequality has become so much more apparent since having a baby, and I’m just too freaking tired to keep having the same argument! (and even replying here, I keep wanting to write, ‘but he’s really not that bad!’) Yes, could totally relate to these rules, and it’s scary how much they are internalised.

Love it. However I think there may be a rule 4b…when you talk about the division of tasks in your house always be sure to mention that you just happen to prefer doing certain chores (the ones that need to be done every day or several times a day) and he just happens to prefer doing different ones (one-time chores, outdoor chores, etc). So really it is all about choices.

You know, I think we’re missing the chance to have a useful conversation here, where we try to understand why the “work-life balance” thing is harder for some women than others, and what we might change about our society and ourselves to make it easier for everyone. I know that some of what I’ve written about my relationship, and some of what I’ve written about not understanding some of the posts and comments I read, falls afoul of your rules. I, for instance, DO believe it is mostly about choice, particularly when you have the money and education that means that choosing to leave would not equal choosing to hurl yourself and your children into poverty, because the alternative to that seems to depressing to me. Choice is at the very heart of free will and power over our own lives.

I also know that if I do dare to write that my husband and I split the work around the house and the parenting 50-50 I always get at least one comment that tells me I am delusional or lying. So I suspect the lack of understanding goes both ways.

But this is not the kind of post to host that conversation. The anger, hurt, and even contempt for women like me in what you wrote is too obvious. Maybe I’ll try to get a conversation going over at my own blog later this week, when I have the time to write a careful post.

So I’ll just say I’m sorry if what I write and other women similar to me write makes you feel judged or hurt. That is never my intention. I will confess, though, that I am often puzzled, and cannot understand, and I am sure that shows in what I write.

Cloud, Bluemilk’s post wasn’t about “feeling judged or hurt”. Bluemilk was identifying the societal rules that are imposed on women, to suppress certain avenues of discussion, to make it hard to complain or get justice. The societal structures and pressures that constrain our ‘choices’ are a big part of That Which Must Not Be Said, Or Else Backlash.

Well, it reads pretty angry to me, and hurt, and yes, I get a certain amount of contempt for people like me who might actually believe that women have choices to make in their relationships and those choices will have consequences on how their lives go. I catch more than a whiff of implication that I am oppressing other women by expressing that, and in some sort of unspoken conspiracy to apply my rules to other people’s lives.

Which is fine. It is her blog and she can write what she wants. I suspect she is a bit angry about some of the responses I saw to her earlier post about the argument with Bill, and frankly, I would have been annoyed by them too, in her shoes, and I can’t help but wonder if that is part of what spurred this post. Since I had comments that might have been hurtful or felt judgmental in that case, I apologized, because I did not intend to hurt or judge.

But all of this makes this not a good place to try to have a conversation about whether or not these rules are universally experienced, and whether or not additional, opposing rules also exist, because we aren’t starting from a place conducive to an open conversation. It is a conversation I would be interested in having and think could be really useful, but not starting from this point. I do not think it would go well, and while I’m happy to engage in a blog conversation- or even argument- if I think I will learn from it, I am not happy to have a bunch of people pile on me because my experiences and views break THEIR rules for feminists.

Cloud, I think what you’re missing is that every choice is contextualized by larger social forces, and sometimes even having a choice at all is a reflection of one’s privilege. Even the belief that it’s “mostly about choice” is a reflection of certain types of privilege. And like any other type of privilege, the having of it isn’t a bad thing, nor does it make you a bad person – but it does mean that a lack of acknowledgement of those privileges gets frustrating for the rest of us.

Bluemilk can speak for herself, of course, but those are the issues I tend to have with “choice feminists,” as I believe they’re called.

But this is not the kind of post to host that conversation. The anger, hurt, and even contempt for women like me in what you wrote is too obvious

Also, this is kinda trolling, here. If it’s not the place to host the conversation, don’t spend four (and then another handful later) writing about it. At least own up to your own feelings and responses.

I took the point to be less that every single woman who writes such things is delusional or lying and more that the pressure to write such things – to swallow, qualify, and minimize any anger you might have, to shrug off the potentially political and insist that it’s merely personal – is enormous…and yes, it undermines the whole conversation about those subjects, because all of a sudden nobody trusts each other – or even themselves – to speak authentically. The problem with “choice” in this context is similar, I think. I mean, you can only see so many comments from 20-something women saying (for example) “well, it just made sense for me to stay home, since he makes more money and my salary wouldn’t bring in anything beyond the cost of daycare” before you start wondering why so many of these women are making so much less money than their male partners.

and BECAUSE that pressure is so immense, there is absolutely no way to knwo if a woman is talking about her own relationship in those ways because it’s really like that, or because of the social pressure to sound that way. It absolutely erases honesty from the discussion even when some of the people are being honest.

Cloud, please let me assure you that I am neither hurt by nor angry with you. I have found your writing, including about your own work-life balance to be considered and non-judgemental. This post is not an attack on you or any other individual blogger. I, myself, have been guilty of one or two of these rules – and to this day struggle with the first one a lot.

The post that originally inspired me in drafting this piece is long gone – I read it several years ago on a big ‘mummy’ blog and it was the writer describing conflict with her partner. It felt like she was ever so slightly pulling her punches, which I can understand because the blow-back is harsh, but then there was literally several hundred comments there all describing a similar disgruntlement with their partners, akin to rage in their descriptions, but no-one was prepared to own so much as ‘anger’ let alone ‘rage’ and I was fascinated – what was going on here, I started to wonder.

I began mentally compiling similar observations as I read other big parenting blogs and I started to notice other ‘rules’ for women talking about relationship conflict. Over the years I have observed these rules in personal conversations with women, too. Some were harder to unpack and understand than others. So, I began reflecting upon feminist writers who I find very brave and truthful in their writing about relationship conflict – like Bitch PhD – and some of my rules are built directly upon their wisdom, particularly in how we can get side-tracked by individualism rather than seeing the bigger picture of ‘choice’.

Whenever I write about arguments with my partner I get two responses. The first, overwhelmingly, is relief from others that this stuff is being talked about, that the rules are being broken. And the second response is serious criticism – that I’m a nagging wife, that I’m disloyal to Bill, that I’m stupid for being in a relationship with him, that I ‘made my bed and should now lie in it’ and shut up about it, too, that I’m in a bad relationship, that I hate men, that Bill must hate me, that I’m self-indulgent for talking about it, that I’m refusing to help myself, that I’m a doormat, that I’m a bitch and on and on it goes. Both responses to my posts make me think something bigger is going on here than just me talking about an argument with my partner. There is a wider issue here and I’ve been long thinking about all that. When I saw the criticism of my latest post about relationship conflict, and particularly the criticisms of those who commented on my post sharing their own experiences, I thought it was about time I wrote this post. But this post is not a conversation with those criticisms and I am not interested in letting it become one, otherwise I would have linked to it.

I have given a lot of consideration over the years to whether or not I share relationship conflict on this blog – friends and family read this blog, and I end up meeting people who read this blog at conferences and the like, it’s not easy to open myself up to everyone. Bill and I have discussed the question several times as a couple. In spite of being a deeply private person Bill fully supports my desire to share some of this stuff on the blog because he understands that this stuff is a reflection of wider conditions of society, and that talking honestly about this stuff on a blog about motherhood is a feminist act.

I am sorry for my response, then. The timing was just coincidence. I am glad I have not offended you. I’ve had an odd conversation going on in my blog reader these last few weeks, with strong, feminist women saying completely opposing things about relationships- but not talking about it with each other, so we never learn anything new.

@jaqbuncad- I am well aware of the larger context in which we all make our choices. Your comment is actually an example of the sort of comment I always get if I post anything about relationships. I don’t respond to that context in the way that people (and maybe feminist theory? I don’t know- I’m not all that well versed in that theory) expect, so I must be deluded and unaware of my surroundings.

I am not unaware. But in the end, we’re the ones living our lives, and if our choices are making us miserable, we’re the ones who will suffer for it, not the rest of society. So while we can blame that context for why the choices we want to make are so hard to make, we defeat only ourselves if we let that context dictate how we conduct our relationships and live our lives.

I also think that finding our way to buck the expectations of the rest of society and make choices within our own relationships that makes them equal and happy may be the only way we ever get those expectations to become less oppressive. Our kids are watching us and learning about relationships.

I’m sorry you experienced my comment as trolling. Perhaps I should have sent a personal email to blue milk instead, since it makes more sense in the wider context of other posts I know she has read because she commented on them. But I was annoyed by the weird “conversation that was not really a conversation” I thought I saw happening, so I posted. Since I now realize that was just coincidence, I’m sorry, and I think I’ll go away from this post and leave y’all to it.

This is awesome! Your posts are like the briefing papers for the ‘equality summits’ my partner and I have from time to time (or whenever my mild irritation tips over into good old rage). You save me a whole lot of flailing around and circling the point and getting distracted by the wrong issues – thank you for all your thinking and writing.

You really do help me grasp a lot of things that just don’t quite reveal themselves in our mixed up lives (stay at home dad married to frustrated salary slave) that ought to make so much sense but the universe is constantly unsettling.

My intellectual, post-structuralist, feminist side loves to crash into expectations “out there” to draw attention to these invisible things and even occasionally soften some that have been carried by someone or other without reflection.

It is hardest when we crash into these expectations in the private sphere: typically around scarcity, the division of labour and the fact that I have stolen my wife’s birthright to care for our infant/toddler/preschooler son. These are difficult issues and it can be difficult to find opportunities to reflect constructively.

Thanks @_camer0n and I am very interested to know how stay-at-home fathers with working-outside-the-home partners experience this dynamic differently or similarly.

One of my favourite male writers on the topic covered this once and said that even with the homelife role reversal he was still being advantaged by it because of the ’tilt of the patriarchy in his favour’ and I would love to see it unpacked and explained even further because I still don’t get some of it (having no experience of this arrangement myself), though I have no trouble believing it: https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/profeminist-fathers/

I was thinking about this just this morning, while my partner was washing our daughter’s hair. He’s a stay at home dad, I work full time outside the home. I started thinking about learned helplessness because if Zi was our daughter’s hair, there is usually a whole lot of crying, soap in the eyes, that sort of thing. He just does it, no drama. So our routine tips heavily into him doing all of that which furthers my inability to do it. So I have a lot more sympathy for learned helplessness now – not huge amounts, but I can see how it happens now. Before it just boggled my mind at how someone would be unable to do washing, or wash up. I’m still horrified if that’s the case, but with a little more empathy.

But the rules still apply. Possibly moreso, because if I don’t like how the home is running, or hate my job and want to quit, or want things to be different somehow, I’m either the harpy who won’t let him work, the heartless career bitch who doesn’t care about her family, the idiot feminist sacrificing personal happiness to prove a political point, or the bitch trying to take away his time with his daughter. I’m in a really really terrible place mentally at the moment and we’re trying to work out what we can do to prevent a slide into serious mental illness, but I still can’t delegate the entirety of household maitenance to him. I still do kindy applications, I still work out refunds for broken things, I still try salvage the shirt he’s laundered improperly and wrecked. All thgs that the rest of the world tells us that I’m the narcissistic, OCD, petty and stupid nagging wife for caring about. And it’s hard to combat that, internally or externally.

One of my favorite people in the world and I just spent an entire afternoon talking about his perspective on these very same issues. He is a long time stay at home dad whose partner is very successful and travels extensively. We incredulously noted how his role was both a source for ridicule and praise but he was still being advantaged by it. He said his ‘guy buddies’ found such glee in diminishing him by mocking his role at home as being ‘light’, “easy,” or “ladies work”. But then they give him the advantage above any actual woman tending the home fires because he’s been ‘big enough’ to take on this role knowing he would be mocked. Or, that because of the patriarchal tilt, they simply view him as handling the business of home and kids better than women. Ultimately it has made him a real feminist ally. And a feminist ally who is passing it on to his son. And that is one tiny step in the right direction as far as I am concerned.

He’s a great, thoughtful conversationalist. I only wish I could articulately impart the jillion bits of wit and wisdom we stumbled upon in the course of the afternoon. I started writing this reply because I wanted to tell you some of those bits…but I don’t think there is room or that anyone would have the patience to read through what could be a small novels worth of revelation. So I guess I’ll just share that we both left with a little more understanding underneath a great deal more intolerance at the insidious nature of the patriarchy. Our conclusion being that we begin to change it where we can, starting with our sons.

My comment will be neither deep, meaningful or particularly intelligent. This piece made me laugh out loud- thank you for pointing out the prissy, ‘washing of your dirty laundry in public’ blogposts. The same women would be horrified to appear on a TV programme like Jeremy Kyle/ Jerry Springer but happily rant online, leaving a permanent record of how tough their life is but how well they cope with it! Oh bliss- pass the bucket, I may have to be sick.
Yours sincerely,
Ella
(Middle aged, divorced, Brit)

Cloud – The timing was not “just coincidence” but the post is not me losing my temper at criticisms either. This is about something bigger.

The reason we are not engaging all that much in a discussion of how our ‘choices’ play a part in our relationship conflict is not because we haven’t considered that aspect before and not because we don’t understand the role of personal responsibility but rather because this discussion has moved past that and on to unpacking some more complex and insidious issues.

Here are two posts where I have devoted attention to more of those aspects of individualism :

FWIW I think you will struggle with conversations with other women where you are wanting to tell them that it is mostly about choice and simply a matter of choosing not to do everything. There are several reasons for this – people don’t like to be fixed, they want to be heard; you will never know their life as well as they know their life, we all need to take it as a given that they are the experts on their life; things usually are more complex than they first appear; it is a sign of unidentified privelege to think that ‘it is all about choice’; and the people you’re talking to are probably pretty intelligent and they are already interrogating themselves about their ‘personal choices and responsibilities’ and that hasn’t been enough, they’re wanting to investigate some other factors.

I strongly object to the way these conversations on my blog about relationship conflict are reduced by some to “women bitching in a futile way about their husbands”. This kind of criticism is misogynist – if people can’t see that these discussions are about something more than that then I am not interested in being in a conversation with them and I don’t have anything to learn from them. (And I think this post is a good example of how the discussion that follows isn’t ‘futile’, isn’t ‘meaningless’, isn’t ‘just bitching’: https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/arguing-with-your-partner-and-other-feminist-work/ )

I am not saying that you do that, I believe you are genuinely open-hearted about wanting to discuss these topics and I think you and I could sit down and have a very long conversation over a glass of wine/cup of tea and find it most enjoyable. I have no trouble believing you that your own relationship is very equal and that you’ve negotiated very successfully with your partner. I have two close feminist friends who say the same about their own relationships. I am sorry people don’t hear you and your truth properly when you try to express that, I hope I haven’t been one of those people. I think as someone said above in the comments, these ‘rules’ I have written about go part of the way to explaining why some don’t believe you when they hear you: we’re used to a high level of dishonesty and magical thinking on this topic.

So then I’m back to thinking we’ve missed a chance to have a useful conversation, but more convinced than ever that the conversation isn’t going to happen.

FWIW, I NEVER comment on someone’s post about their relationship and tell them how to “fix” their life. The closest I might come is a “this is what worked for me” comment, and I don’t think I’ve left one of those in ages, except on blogs I know well and know are actually looking for advice/ideas. I generally don’t comment on relationship posts at all. I read them because I genuinely wish I could understand what is going on, but so far I have failed. I have no idea what possessed me to comment here, since it is going as poorly as I could have predicted and just making me sad. I had sworn I wasn’t coming back and then I followed a link form a tweet and ended up back here and damn it I should have just clicked away.

I just wrote, erased, and rewrote, and re-erased a defense of my viewpoint. I think I’ll leave it all unsaid, because I can’t find a gracious way to say what I think, and you don’t deserve the grumpy comment that keeps coming out. But I will ask you and the rest of the “regulars” here to think about this: the way this gets framed is genuinely scaring a lot of young women. I know because they write me emails after they stumble across my blog and they interrogate me until they convince themselves I am not lying about my life. They think that it is not possible to have the life I have- and apparently your friends have. And, for the record, several of my friends have. So they think they have to choose between having a career and a family.

Feminist blogs shout down voices like mine- and believe me, they do, yours is the last feminist blog I frequent, and I hardly ever comment here anymore- I am no shrinking violet, and I don’t mind (love, even) a good discussion. I’ve defended a PhD and I work in a field where I regularly have to argue my points. Trust me, I don’t mind an argument. But it has to be a two way discourse. I hate the comments sections on most feminist blogs, because there seems to be only one allowed viewpoint on many key topics (like this one), and little patience for discussion with “outsiders” like myself. So if they shout down and exclude voices like mine, are they really doing a good thing? Because damn it, I think I’m living the life that my mother’s generation fought for. Why is that viewpoint unwelcome on a feminist blog?

To be honest, it feels like I am being patted on my head and told to go do my homework. But if my lived experience contradicts the theory you think I should read, why would I trust the theory? I come from a science background- experience trumps theory every day. And if you only want to talk to people who subscribe to the same theories you do, how will you know when your theories are wrong?

I’m sorry for hijacking this thread. I’ll go away now and try to stay gone this time. This is not the discussion that belongs on this thread, and this thread is not a good place to try to have the discussion I’d like to have.

Best thing I’ve read in ages, but ultimately the scariest as it rings so true. I’ve oft wondered about my quiet unease with my home life – I no doubt would make the same excuses and qualifications for my partner whilst second guessing many misgivings. It’s just so unforgivable to nag and carry on and wtf am I talking about anyway as that invisible work is impossible to quantify.

We are privileged, and I chose to stay home despite being degree educated with a high paying job but my gods had I had the first clue of what that meant, and the sacrifices I would make (me, not him, as his life has only improved for the most part) I may have chosen differently. I struggle to really feel there is an understanding by my partner when all his work peers absolutely are married to women who would play that traditional wifey role without question or complaint.

Anyway thank you for being that person who understands and articulates so wonderfully.

I absolutely love your blog, and this post is riveting. There is so much here (just as much in the comments, if not more, than the original post – and, thanks, too for explaining where the post germinated from) that I want to think about and respond to, but there is precious little time to do so. So I will use it thinking.

I don’t even have enough anecdata to forumulate these style of rules, but there’s some added things that occur when you and your partner can be identified by colleagues and/or family. Criticisms of your partner’s extra-familial commitments, for example, are not permissable because they might cause him difficulty in the workplace, and the workplace must not be criticised in a specific way: you can talk about work-life balance in a general way, but you can’t name names.

I read Cloud’s blog regularly and this one on occasion. I do think she talks about or acknowledges privilege of buying help to some degree. I have commented on her blog and others of higher-middle income who write about work/life juggling to remind them and other readers that not all women have the option to buy balance, as I put it.

Absolutely true bluemilk. I saw this post as analysis of a pattern, not a dig at people (although it is kind of amusing in a grim, black-humour kind of way). There’s a similar pattern going on with advice letters at http://thehairpin.com, where commenters now expect that the nicer the description of a partner starts out, the more horrible the thing it is they are doing that the letter-writer wanted advice on. Some of these people are doing the most horrible things but letter-writers still feel they have to point out what a great person their arsehole partner is! The difference is that the things you are discussing here are not necessarily things that should end a relationship, they are things that should and could be worked out equally between adults.

One aspect that you may be missing here from those who are critical is that it’s easy for singles to read a rant about a partner and think ‘How terrible, so he expects to be told to do the housework, at least you have a partner, who does SOME things around the house’. Of course, there are others who are happier and make comments such as you mentioned (e.g. why are you in a relationship then).

I think the women are also similarily repressed by a larger societal context when speaking about motherhood as well – for example #1, a woman must qualify the statement that she doesn’t enjoy beign a SAHM (if she dares to express such a thing in the first place) with a disclaimer about how much she loves her kids, how much motherhood completes her, etc.